Our good friend Donald Douglas has a post concerning the poor, pitiful students in the University of California system, having to pay higher tuition.
Protesters Seize Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley (VIDEO) — Plus, Police Close Roads to UC Santa Cruz as Campus Comes Under Seige!
From Oakland’s KTVU TV, “Protesters Take Over Wheeler Hall On UC Berkeley Campus“:
A group of approximately 40 students protesting the fee hikes approved by University of California Regents Thursday have reportedly taken over Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus Friday morning.
KTVU has received reports that a group of students are currently occupying the building. UC campus police have cordoned off the building with police tape as eight or nine additional squad cars arrived to address the situation.
Students could be seen hanging out of windows on upper floors at Wheeler Hall. There are reports that police have already used pepper spray in one confrontation with the students. Officers appear to be preparing to make arrests in an effort to regain control of the building.
The students are taking a stand against the fee hike approved by Regents Thursday that will push the cost of undergraduate education to more than $10,000 a year.
So, it would push tuition to more than $10,000 a year? For my older daughter, a junior at Penn State, tuition for sciences and engineering is $15,580 per year. Because the Pennsylvania state legislature still hasn’t finalized the state budget — the one due last July — tuition may rise again for the spring semester of this academic year. I can’t say that we’re pleased about that.
But Penn State, like the University of California system, is a state-supported system, one paid for, ultimately, by the taxpayers. It’s pretty clear that the taxpayers don’t want to see their taxes increased; the poll results say that here in the Keystone State, but in Dr Douglas’ Pyrite State the voters had the choice put to them more directly, and they rejected a proposed “temporary” tax increase by a two-to-one margin.
The UC students want lower tuition? So does everybody else! But somebody has to pay for the costs of education, and it’s clear that the taxpayers think that they are already paying their fair share, and more.
We may wind up having to pay part of PFC Pico’s tuition out of our pockets, her benefits from the Army notwithstanding. If we do, we do. We might not like writing out a big check, but there is something a bit unfair about the notion that the UC students, and my own daughter, would ask taxpayers who never had much of an opportunity to go to college themselves, who are struggling to make ends meet and put food on their tables, to dig deeper into their pockets to send more privileged students to college.
Entitlements
time to put up the pvt pico school donation button.
I have my own version of the same potential problem…
In the mid ’70s the cost of instruction at UC Santa Barbara was $226/qtr or $678/yr. Same for the other UC campuses. It was a heck of a deal. Great education, superb environment, pretty girls, miles of beach, 2 point breaks, a lagoon on campus. I’d do it again right now if I could, those were wonderful days.
The Artfldgr wrote:
This button will do the trick!
I have to agree college education is far too expensive and the students have a right to be displeased. But their antics won’t change anything. My solution is painfully simple. Actually, it’s simple long-term and very painful short-term. Stop government funding of post-secondary schools. Without the tax dollars coming in, those post-secondary schools will have a huge problem. Do they continue to overpay the top-loaded administration or do they cut the pay and number of administration? Do they continue to pay “professors” to stay out of the classrooms or do they force the “professors” to actually teach?
The biggest problem with college cost is the government subsidy (our tax dollars going to waste).
One problem is, the big Universities have become big businesses, who, like any private corporation, depend on government largess to make ends meet.
It is like health care, we have not implemented a formula that most other countries have used successfully.
I don’t know the answer, but I will say the problem goes back to our inability to provide a quality education for all children, thus creating an underclass, many of whom can never break out of their mold.
In an ideal world, a college education should be free of charge, with admission based on competition based on academic performance.
In our country, this will never happen, because it is not in our culture. Our college education does educate a greater percentage of our population than our competitor nations, so that is a good thing.
So the best we can do, in my view, is to keep focusing on primary and secondary education, paying what is required to attract more quality teachers, and to make college education loans available at very low interest. This will enable academic standards and performance to increase, and more students to get a college education. For those not qualified, and for adults needing additional education, we need the tech/vocational schools and community colleges to enable training for other occupations.
For us, our post HS education system is decent, but we need to work to expand it and increase the quality, while simultaneously focusing on the pre-college education needs of our young people. This has not been happening in recent years!
Perry wrote:
Is that not a formula for insuring that the children of the wealthier among us — I assume here that higher intelligence has some correlation with economic rewards — get a free ride on the labors of people who are less intelligent and whose children have less of a chance to go to college?
Perry wrote:
How much training do you really need to be a garbageman? Do you need community college to be able to work as a cashier at Seven-Eleven or stock grocery shelves?
Let’s face facts here: our society and economy needs the manual laborers, the minimum wage employees who provide all sorts of small services. If the doctors and the garbagemen both went on strike, which ones do you think the vast majority of people would miss more?
Perry wrote:
This is an argument that the National Education Association continues to make, but it has a corollary that few people seem to notice: if the argument is that we need better quality teachers, does than not mean the ones we have now are of insufficient quality? And if they are, wouldn’t raising their wages, to attract higher quality people into the profession, simply lock the poorer quality people into their jobs, since they’d be less likely to quit if they were receiving higher salaries, and tenure protects them from being fired?
Public schools at all levels are getting increasingly top-heavy, and that is a huge problem. Too many people above the teachers. Too many peripheral positions. Not enough focus on actual teaching (and that’s not saying anything about what is/isn’t being taught). As long as tax dollars keep rolling in, and in ever increasing quantities, the schools will never have to get down to business.
I don’t know the answer, but I will say the problem goes back to our inability to provide a quality education for all children, thus creating an underclass, many of whom can never break out of their mold.
First of all, there are millions of Americans who have and continue to receive quality educations in America. Most of us are the end product of such so we have to assume that is a gross generalization.
The other issue that must simultaneously be addressed when questioning the quality of education for all children, and any subsequent underclass, is the one of a gross familial breakdown in our culture.
Public schools have been transformed from institutions of education to social institutions where feeding, clothing, providing base medical care (dental/eye/hearing exams, asthma clinics, etc) are the norm. It is not only expected that schools provide these for students but is also mandated by the federal government.
The level of social problems, family dysfunctions, group home children, drug babies, children being shuttled from one system of care to another with no stability, etc., currently in our public schools, is staggering. Teachers are pushed to do far, far more than the three R’s, and on top of that is the extraordinary bureacracy which certainly doesnot have the best interest of education at heart.
It’s a messy situation, but I do know that as a parent who paid a total of 23 years of private school tuitions for three kids, and subsequent UCLA tuitions, it is not the responsibility of anyone else to pay, nor would I have ever sought it out. I chose to have the kids, I chose to educate them. It comes with the territory. While the UC’s might be more than what a lot can afford, the beauty of education here is that there are community colleges which are reasonable costs and one’s general ed can be done. There are also state colleges that provide, in many cases, as quality of an education – possibly even better, than one would find at the UC system.
IMO, anyway…
Perry wrote:
Is it that we don’t provide the opportunity for a quality education, or that some students don’t come prepared to receive an education? Is it that teachers don’t try to teach — or aren’t themselves able to teach — or that some students don’t try to learn?
Students enter the public education system at age five; that means they have had five years to learn good, productive initial habits from their parents and their cultures, or five years to learn bad, poorly productive initial habits from their parents — or too often, parent — and their cultures.
Maybe if they’d stop voting Democrat then Kalifornia wouldn’t be broke from over-spending.
our inability to provide a quality education for all children
This is really nagging at me: what defines quality education, what outcomes evidence it, and perhaps more pertinent to the discussion, when you say provide a quality education, what responsibility and burden rests with the educator and what responsibility and burden rests with the parents in order for the “quality education” to not only be imparted but received, absorbed and assimilated in a student? In my 7:53 comment, this was sort of where I was leading to. It’s difficult to measure a quality education without taking into consideration the state of mind, being, and readiness of the student. They are not mutually exclusive. It would be easier if they were, but they aren’t.